


Seasons of your life

by TerresDeBrume



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: M/M, Thank you fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-09 14:31:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/775277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TerresDeBrume/pseuds/TerresDeBrume
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You open your eyes for the first time in the desert, with a child at your feet and the letters 'Thor' traced in the sand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. This is your Spring

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Felifay](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Felifay).



> This fic is written as a thank you present for Felifay, who made a chapter header for _The Swayze Protocole_ :)

 

  
**{** **By night}**  


Your eyes open for the first time on a clear evening in December, stars blinking over your head and on your sides, the desert sky looking endless around you... You're barefoot, but you don't feel the cold, forgotten in favor of admiring the beauty of the world around. It looks shiny and new to you, and you want to drink it in for as long as you can.

There is a child sleeping next to you.  
He looks peaceful, a small smile playing on his lips despite the dirt on his face and the sweat sticking his blonde hair to his head. In the sand, you manage to decipher the letters _Thor_ , written there in the shaky handwriting of an overexcited boy.  
You bend down to add a '&' next to it, but it occurs to you right then that you have no idea of what your name is. You think on it for a minute, until the knowledge comes to you as unexpectedly as writing. You have no idea how your can use any alphabet, but you don't question it any more than you question the sudden certitude that makes you write 'Loki' and add a swirl underneath.  
You sort of wish you could have written in green ink.

You pick the child -Thor- from the ground and decide to follow the stars east, because you have to have some form of direction after all. You make the decision just then that you will not try to know how your learned any of what you presently know, mostly because these things seem to come back to you just when you need them, and you're apparently the kind of person who doesn't look a gift horse in the mouth this time around.

(You're not quite sure where the 'this time around' comes from either, but you decide to add it on the list of things you don't need to explain right away, hook Thor on your shoulders and start walking.)

  
You find a little town named Puerte Antigo after your fifth hour of walk, and stumble almost immediately on a ratty-looking motel with sand in the corners and wooden doors polished by countless sandstorms. The people here look suspicious of you and this sleeping child, so you come up with a vague story about a car accident further up on the track, about you and your nephew needing to settle down somewhere quiet so you can recover from... Uh. His father's death. You say Thor's father was your cousin, your only living kin, and you took him out of school for a while so you could get used to each other.  
Nobody asks about Thor's mother and you feel glad for it.

The boy hasn't even stirred once since you started walking, and the pulse under the skin of his neck is the only thing preventing you from panicking.

Once you reach your room -in the farthest part of the motel- you decide to look at the content of your pockets. Thor's jeans and shirt are far too large for him, bunching between the two of you in a way that makes you sure you’ll be sporting red marks soon. Nothing seems to be able to wake him up, not even when you seize him byu the shoulder and shake him like a tree.  
(you don’t do that too long, afraid you’ll hurt him, but it’s still disturbing that it doesn’t work at all.)  
You’re not very surprised that you don’t find any money, but it’s still worrisome, and so you decide to head out to the only bar you’ve seen in town.

You don't feel as surprised as you probably should to discover your talent in pick pocketing people, a lot more when you realize you're also excellent as darts. You take bets and you make sure to lose a few rounds to keep people coming. There are a lot of travelers coming and going, you note, and you think maybe you'll be able to make this work.

**{By day}**

You don't remember what happens during he day, if anything does happen at all. You think you might be dreaming, but you wouldn't swear on it. Maybe -but that's a thought you try not to entertain too much- you're remembering. Or maybe you're really dreaming at night and living during the day -it certainly feels like it, at any rate, even if it doesn't exactly say good thing about you and your life.

The world is dark during the day, the steel gray of stormy skies swirling above your head as you stride across bloodied fields littered with corpses, blood pooling in where the ground can't absorb it. In front of you, a tribunal stands, saying you need to pay for your crimes, saying you need to atone for your sins, and around your mouth there is the cold feeling of metal biting in your skin, a muzzle of silver and gold made to mock you and the talent with which you spurn words.

You want to scream your denial, protest, tell them you're innocent, but it all stays stuck in your throat, and you think the burn in your eyes might be caused by tears you violently refuse to shed.

**{By night}**

Some nights, you wake up on a scream and the relief you feel then is too great to tell.  
The sticky notes on your forehead give you accounts of Thor's days and the discoveries he made, and it makes you smile enough that eventually you start doing the same. Neither of you seem to ever wake from their slumber, and it's both a blessing -for it allows you to move freely so you can earn money for the room- and a curse -what if something happens while one of you is alone in bed?  
Still, on the whole, you think your life could be worse. You have friends -or acquaintances at least- and so does Thor, and you start entertaining the thought of maybe staying here for however long you live.

**{By day}**

Your dreams are filled with a damp cell and black fingernails on blue skin -they fill you with horror and disgust, make you want to scream until you bring the walls down as the wolf does in the stories about three little pigs. You wait and wait and wait and nothing comes until an old man with white-blonde hair and an eyepatch visits you, tells you he never wanted things to come to this.

You want to say you're sorry but you snarl instead.

You wait and wait and wait again, until you get another visitor but this time it's a wolf, and his fangs drip with blood.

**{By night}**

One night, about a month after you came in town, you run into one of the men you met on your first night an he whistles:

"Wow, dude, you look like you're thirty! What the hell happened to make you age ten years so fast?"

It's a slap in your face, not because you're vain, but because it means you won't be able to stay here, after all. You know, deep in your stomach, that your body won't slow down. You know you'll keep aging fast, faster than normal, faster than you want to.  
For the first time you let yourself wonder why you're made this way, why it fell upon you to live an entire life in so short a time. You wonder if it even qualifies as living if you don't have time to love -what if you never get to see New York, or eat Italian food, or have sex? A month ago, you thought little of those things. They were foreign to you. Now they are all you can think about.

The question of love torments you especially.  
It's like a craving, like wishing for a drug you've never tasted, and you look at people harder now, wondering if anyone in the bar could do the trick... You feel, deep in your gut, that they wouldn't, and that makes you a lot less sad when you pack your things an hour later and leave town in the beat up truck Thor and you pitched in to buy for less than five hundred dollars.  
Seven hours if driving north later, you barely have time to check in a new motel before the sun rises and you fall to the ground like a stringless puppet.

**{By day}**

The wolf howls and tears into flesh and bones alike, and it takes you far too long to realize there will be no end to his fury or yours. You are watching the world burn and no thought rings sweeter in your head than knowing you are the match that set it all aflame.

**{By night}**

You wake up with the unexpected, odd idea that you are a match, and it makes you laugh to think of it when you step inside the bar. Still, as you scan the crowd, you can't help but wonder what it would be more of a kerosene person, to be set aflame and consummated in the sweetest of braziers, to fall asleep like embers growing cold and a coat of ash weighing against you, keeping you safe, grounded.

When you go to the bar and see the older man staring into his glass, you don't think of him as a match -or kerosene, or any of this. You don't think of him as the sun, or moon, or stars, and you don't think of him as something perfect or precious... You think he looks just like the bourbon he's sipping: old and biting but also good in its own way.  
You walk over to him, sitting yourself on the stool a stripper with a side activity just vacated, and when he turns his head toward you expecting a compliment or a pick up line -because this is how bars work- you tell him the hourglass shape in his goatee looks ridiculous, to which he replies it's better than looking like you escaped from a documentary on failed musicians from the eighties.  
You both snort and he orders you another bourbon.

He does turn out to be as sharp and bitter as alcohol, the taste of doubt and sorrow clinging to the edge of his skin so hard he doesn't even put up much of a fight when you get to your room and start undressing him with Thor sleeping under the cover.  
He fucks you against the bedroom door, almost unprepared, and again on the dubiously-colored rug, softer but just as passionate. You do your best not to laugh or cry at first, pain almost as intense as pleasure and embarrassment at the sounds you make almost enough to make you want to sleep.

Afterward, you wonder what made you want him instead of someone more handsome, someone younger. You think, maybe, it was because out of all the people in the room he was the one who looked the most like you and the image you want to convey.  
You rest your head against his chest as he dozes off, listening to the beating of his heart slow down until he is on the verge of sleep, then decide if this is to be your only night with him, you might as well make it profitable.

He wakes up quick enough when you take his cock in your mouth.


	2. This is your Summer

**{By night}**

 

“You know, you could have warned me about the whole _Lady and the Hawk_ thing. Would have made waking up a hell of a lot less confusing... and terrifying. I don’t like wondering if I fucked a kid.”

  


You immediately realize the dirty green ceiling above you head isn’t the one you fell asleep to, but it takes you far too long to identify the voice that just spoke and put all the pieces together.

  


“You seemed sharper when we were drunk,” hourglass-beard tells you when you sit up and blink at him, “but then again that’s almost always the case when I get drunk.”

  


You... sort of assume you should be offended by his statement in one way or another but you inexperience -or age, or something else entirely- prevents you from reacting, a thick lump of affection lodging itself in your throat deep enough that you’re not sure you’ll be able to swallow it.

  


“Then again,” Hourglass-beard continues, “If you’d warned me I’d have assumed you were crazy and left before we could have sex, which would have been a terrible idea so....”

“Why did you come with us?”

  


You realize -although a tad late- that this probably wasn’t the best question to ask, but even though it’s sort of rude, you know you need an answer, and you need it now. You’re not sure why, exactly, but you do, and so you don’t let yourself regret the question.

Your nervous hand finds Thor’s small ankle and you close your fingers around it, telling yourself to keep breathing, that you will always have him, if no one else.

  


“I’m bored,” Hourglass shrugs. “I’ve got money, and over a year left off my job so I figured I might as well not pass on the mysteriously cursed sex god, you know?”

  


You want to ask if he’s even going to stay, if you’re just a whim that’s going to leave him as soon as it came, but even you know better than that already, even if you’re not yet a year old. You swallow your doubt and the intense but irrational need to hear him promise to stay by your side, and offer your name instead.

  


“I’m Tony”, he answers you, a hand outstretched.

  


His palm feels hot enough to burn against your skin, but it’s your heat you can feel melting.

  


**{By day}**

  


The wolf tears through the crowd of your enemies, sprinkling drops of boiling blood over the battlefield and they burn your eyes, your face, your hands. You don’t feel them. You look through the mass of armored bodies and corpses blurring under the rain, trying to find the one-eyed man and dismissing everything else -even survival- as a secondary task.

 

You are here to kill him.

 

You want to feel his blood on your hands, the rhythm of his heart slowing down beneath your fingers, the cold of death seeping into his bones.

You want revenge; though you don’t remember what for, and you know you will stop at nothing to get it. Not even your own death, not even the end of the world: nothing.

 

You bare your teeth in a grin as wild as the wolf you ride.

 

**{By night}**

 

You take as much of Tony as he is willing to give.

 

You drink his grin, his laugh, his smile. You get drunk on the way he looks in dimly lit streets and cheap bars, face carved deep with shadows that make the light all the more appealing.

You drag him to various locations you wish you could see in the light of day, places of culture, of history, of science. You break into dozens of libraries to complete your book collection and kiss him when he tries to remind you the car you drive does not have an extensible trunk.

 

You read with him, for him, about magic that heals and magic that fights evil, magic that can be reversed and turned back on your foe rather than implacable spells shortening your lifespan.

(You find yourself thinking that _real_ magic doesn’t work like that, but you can’t figure out why and, eventually, you just let go of the idea, like you have let go of so many others before.)

  


You kiss Tony with the passion of a life you won’t get to live, the intensity of a kerosene fire flaring to life from still warm embers -you are acutely aware that your end is nearing, even through the youth flowing in your veins.

You make love to him with the faith of years you don’t possess, the sensuality of skin that will not get to age, and you worship him until you are sure you will take the taste of his soul with you in your last journey.

 

You relish the feeling of his come on your hands, his heartbeat picking up beneath your fingers, the heat of lust and passion infusing him down to his very bones.

 

You are the peak of an orgasm, the second breath of professional runners, the moment a parachute opens and saves you from certain death.

Your soul has been distillated, resentment and worry left behind like so much impurity, and now you have only love and joy and life left to feel.

  


You want to thank whoever put you there, for your life will be short, but you also know it will be better lived than many a longer one.

 

**{By day}**

 

You find your enemy standing on the corpse of an eight-legged black stallion, and the sight fills you with a rage you can’t explain, much stronger than you ever thought you could feel.

 

The wolf howls, pain and hatred mingling in his voice, and when you dismount him and wave him away, his snarl looks more determined, far more bitter and blood thirsty than it was before. You ignore him though, leaving him to his grim servings of death, death, death, and take a swing of your spear at the old man, who ducks with infuriating ease.

 

He parries all your attacks, as if he knew what move you would use before you made them, and you want nothing more than to beat him to a pulp -you hate him, you hate him, you _hate him_ , and the thought consumes you, clouds your mind and eyes with black coils of sickening smoke, fills your nose with the decaying stench of burning human fat, stabs you hand with the sting of a thousand lives shattered with your fingers.

 

You hate him and it show in the strength of your arms, in the lack of thought behind your hits, in the raw feeling of your throat that you refuse to call tears -and yet, through all of this, there comes a point when you stop.

 

In front of you, the old man is crying.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As usual, commentsd and critiques are welcome <3


End file.
